> Contrast that to the US which could leave a person bankrupt for the same emergency.
Indeed. Even if you have good insurance, getting something like a heart attack, cancer, etc. in the US makes it likely that you'll be bankrupt in the end. I know three people that this has happened to.
Same with the NHS that's often derided. Cancer, heart attack, stroke? You'll be treated very quickly with the very best treatments.
Need some physio, but delaying it isn't going to cause ongoing problems? You're going to wait.
If you want to skip the queues then there's affordable private healthcare as well for non-urgent issues ... my plan with BUPA costs my employer £1,600 per year.
Money being spent causes the economy to grow. How is that a bad thing? The investments of rich people often never see the consumer economy.
It doesn't matter how they utilize it, UBI is still reducing inequality. You are allowing families to purchase things they wouldn't have had the money for otherwise. Quality of life purchases that the well-off take for granted.
We need to rethink reward structures in this country. The fact that an investor can put up some capital and then gain "dividends" for as long as a company exists is ludicrous to me. They aren't actively doing anything to earn those dividends. It's simply a scheme to reward those with capital and assets.
Meanwhile, the employees who work hard to contribute to GDP and grow the company see a fixed salary. They do not see those dividends for the rest of their lives, instead when they leave a company it's over. Why? Why don't employees build up dividend streams from the companies they helped build? Why do Amazon employees get paid minimum wage and are denied bathroom breaks when Bezos' net worth can swing $9B in a single day? Why aren't all employees, from Janitor to CEO receiving dividends from the success of the company?
It all seems ridiculous to me. We need to encourage people to work hard and innovate, not sit on piles of capital and assets.
I'm someone who invests heavily and takes advantage of the system. But I see the flaws and it really bothers me.
My proposal would simply be to make it a legal obligation for all companies to provide ownership in the company proportional to salary each year they are employed. Not only that, it's a special type of stock which is paid dividends on profits before external shareholders. This stock should have exclusive premium benefits over any other stock. A lot of thought would need to be put into how to structure this so it could not be gamed.
External shareholders could still see a return. But I think the days of seeing massive returns on capital need to be over. It should be a fight just to beat inflation imho.
To be honest though I'm still thinking about this a lot and don't have an exact answer. So this idea is in flux. That doesn't mean it's not a problem though.
Employees are welcome to use a portion of their salary to purchase a stake in the companies they work for already. Mandating that their employer do that on their behalf (thus decreasing their cash salaries) probably wouldn't go over too well.
If fact, its generally considered a poor idea to own shares in the company you work for - if the company takes a downturn, not only do your shares lose value, you're probably also out of a job.
> The investments of rich people often never see the consumer economy.
That's not true at all. Investments from the rich contribute greatly to the economy -- otherwise they would not be investments. Let's say that I had a billion dollars, and all I did was stick it into a savings account. The bank uses that to fund mortgages, LoCs, provide business loans, etc. Those all have a direct effect on the economy.
More likely the rich are investing in a combination of VC, real estate, and the stock market. Those are ALL job creators.
Really the only thing you can do with money that DOESN'T contribute to economic growth is bury it in the ground or spend it overseas.
Money spent well causes the economy to grow. Mindlessly spending money on things that aren't worth their cost is simply waste, and causes the economy to shrink.
In economics it is generally assumed that money wouldn't be spent if the transaction wasn't expected to generate a net benefit for the spender. If you make spending money a goal in its own right, however, then that is no longer true, and spending can result in a net loss instead.
But entitled to damages? We are opening the doors to some very shady law firms to shake down tech companies based on laws that were written before the internet.
What does the Internet not existing before the ADA have to do with it? Also, movies existed before the law did, and so did online services (for example, AOL, CompuServe).
By the way, the Internet existed, but it wasn't available to the general public.
I believe you're mostly correct in terms of current legal situation in the USA.
Downvotes are primarily going to be from people who would prefer that wasn't the case.
However, I believe most accessibility improvements must be "reasonable" accomodations and generally I think aren't intended to be onerous costs (unreasonable).
So there's room for debate on whether accessibility should NO LONGER be a right in the USA. And also room for debate on what's reasonable.
But I don't think this statement: "accessibility is a right" should be downvoted on HN. Its a fact of law, due to the Americans with Disabilities Act.
> I don't think this statement: "accessibility is a right" should be downvoted on HN. Its a fact of law
This is a global community, though. Many probably interpret the statement from a moral/idealistic standpoint rather than whether or not it's a legal right in any particular jurisdiction.
The situation's essentially the same in the UK (EU?) due to it being a protected characteristic under the Equality Act.
You can't say 'well disabled people aren't the target demographic, so no I don't have a ramp' any more than you can say 'whites only'.
The other commenter didn't claim it was a moral (as opposed to statutory) right, but even if that was the intention, I think that's a reasonable position to take and argue for, even if others disagree.
I believe that's an open question currently and badly needs legal clarification.
One standard proposed at HN from time to time is that maybe websites with high revenue should be required to conform with a specific standard such as W3C's WCAG 2.1 AA.
But it's an open question and I don't know if lawmakers are even aware of WCAG, that would be nice.
You're making a lot of assumptions with a clear bias there. Just because you don't want this model for games, doesn't mean nobody does. I tried Stadia with Assassin's Creed in the Alpha and it was a wonderfully low bar to entry. I was able to play the new Assassin's Creed on my Macbook. There's a lot of value to that.
Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with (be it modding, programing, custom patches or whatever). And i do see it through the potential of things going bad because if things go perfect then everything is fine.
I focus on the bad side because i do not want the bad things to happen and i see the bad things way worse than the good things.
> Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with
I share your sentiments, but this battle was already lost a decade ago when Steam won - Apple is just twisting the dagger with it's App Store and their unceasing march to turn OS X into an appliance (limiting 'root', and with catalina, what you can put in '/')
While i'm not a fan of Steam, with it you can still keep the files around and some games are DRM free or rely on a DLL that you can easily replace. See Scott Ross' recent video about Trackmania 2 Nation for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulp99wSUNgk
But personally i prefer GOG where i have hundreds of games (though it isn't the only store i use - any that give me DRM-free games, like Humble Store or GamersGate - is fine) and i keep my own offline copies (including games from stores that have long gone - another reason i dislike DRM schemes and prefer to have control over my files).
I run Linux and LineageOS because I care about controlling my computers and data. But I don't care about games.
They're games. They're not important. They're not art worth preserving. It's just a little entertainment. A risk of "losing" a game that I would probably not play again anyway is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for a hassle free gaming experience.
When I play a game, I sink hours of my finite life into it without any possibility of ever getting that time back. When I "preserve" a game, what does that cost me? Less space on my bookshelf than a typical mass-market paperback novel. Virtually nothing. The cost of preserving a game is far less than the cost of playing it.
Ergo, any game not worth preserving is not worth playing.
I'm sure a lot of people feel the same as you, but I very much disagree.
If games aren't art worth preserving, then neither is television, movies, music, etc. I don't see how one can claim those mediums are art but games are somehow not.
You're aware that DVDs are older than Netflix and MP3s are older than Spotify?
They absolutely used to be preservable until an enormous technological effort was made to make them non-preservable. The amount of people curating their CD (or later MP3) collections showed they cared very much.
> If you really love a certain movie or song/album, you will buy it separately. Why not the same with games?
Because it's not clear at all that this option would still exist. From a publisher's perspective, it's vastly preferable to just sell access to your game and keep the actual binary under wraps. So if there is a way how they could realistically do that, I don't think there will be much motivation to also offer the game as standalone software.
Or, to be more precise, you'll able to "buy" the game alright, but what you're buying is just access to the game on a streaming service, not an actual copy.
> Or, to be more precise, you'll able to "buy" the game alright, but what you're buying is just access to the game on a streaming service, not an actual copy.
Which, to be fair, is also the desired effect of something like Steam. If Valve turns off your account, you lose access to all the games you've bought.
The last resort of tricking the DRM to retain access to the stuff you "own" is only possible due to the technical limitations that mandate distribution of the files to a user's local system. I'm sure publishers would love to be able to just stream blobs, making this type of thing much more difficult.
My worry is that some games will be distributed exclusively through these streaming services and people will be unable to even obtain a local copy. There's certainly incentive for publishers to do so since it'd eliminate piracy, and perhaps Google will give exclusivity deals to various titles.
Due to this I'm actually kind of hoping for this service to fail to catch on.
The issue with this is that Netflix/Spotify are pay once monthly, and consume whatever you want whenever you want.
With Stadia, you pay once monthly, and then you pay for the game on top of that cost. The same price you'd pay if you bought the game for any other platform, which also has the benefit of letting you own the game (physical copies, files downloaded to hardware you own).
That's just the current payment model, but that is orthogonal to the underlying technology. I can imagine a Spotify Free version of Stadia (yes, with ads or other limits) and a Premium all-you-can-play version. Game demos can be replaced by "Play now" buttons on YouTube, literally dropping you into the game in seconds.
What the platform promises is to match the ease of use of YouTube or Netflix. If it can actually deliver on that, I'm sure we'll see a lot of different business takes on the same technology. As someone who started gaming on an Atari and still maintains a top-of-the-line PC, I see a streaming model as inevitable since games need to compete with the Netflixes of the world for your attention. As a new dad, the barrier (timewise) to actually playing something these days is prohibitive, so Netflix wins by default for me when I have an hour.
> They're games. They're not important. They're not art worth preserving. It's just a little entertainment. A risk of "losing" a game that I would probably not play again anyway is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for a hassle free gaming experience.
The people for eho games were a major part of their childhood as well as the profession of game designers would like a word with you.
I also tested Project Stream, and the vision then made a lot more sense, that you were playing a game with cloud saves that could then be continued on your own hardware. This is the model Microsoft is creating with their xCloud while Stadia is forcing you to pay full price for a game for a diminished experience.
